Austin Z. Henley Associate Teaching Professor Carnegie Mellon University 10/18/2025 What are the design decisions involved in building an AI coding assistant? A paper was recently published, The Design Space of LLM-Based AI Coding Assistants: An Analysis of 90 Systems in Academia and Industry, by Sam Lau and Philip Guo at UC San Diego that tries to answer this question. They looked at 90 AI coding assistants and identified 10 design dimensions. The paper describes how we went from autocomplete t...